Strength Training for Ultrarunning Part 2 with CTS Coach Sarah Scozzaro⎮KoopCast Episode 16

what's going on people welcome to another episode of the KoopCast i'm psyched that you guys are here today i hope that you guys listen to the last episode of the KoopCast episode 15 with coach sarah scazzaro she her and i we talked about strength training for ultra running and is uh is that the right decision for you should you actually incorporate strength training into your ultra running routine and this podcast is simply an extension of that if you determined yes that hey i want to include strength training in my uh in my running routine i feel that it will be a benefit to my performance or i want to use it to try to reduce my chance of injury this podcast is for you and we run through the entire run of show we take a scenario where we look at an athlete that we have nine months to work with and what we would do throughout those nine months not only from a strength training perspective but also from a running perspective which you cannot disassociate those two you have to include both of them at at the at the same time we go over some scenarios for realistic athlete scenarios if you only have five months to train six months to train should you actually

incorporate strength training how little time do you need what's the minimum effective dose that you need to get a benefit from strength training and we talk about some things to avoid what's not strength training so if you loved the last episode of the KoopCast you're going to love this one even more super practical very relevant some you'll have things that you can absolutely take into the weight room and out onto the trails tomorrow or today if you're listening to this before your run you'll have some things that you can absolutely take away from this that you can implement immediately so here we go without any further ado here is my conversation strength training part two with cts coach sarah i knew i would mess her name up we've been joking about this with each other every single every single time scizarro sarah scizarro on strength training for ultra running i don't even know talking names pronunciation scizarro that's my uh there we go is that right is that close that was right because i really no that was spot on all right you got to give me you gotta give me like positive reinforcement and then when i fuck it up you just gotta say oh god you're an idiot just use it a couple times during this podcast i get the chance if i if i so my my default fully admit this my default is is like if i'm ever in a situation where i would know i'm gonna flub

whatever word i want to use i just divert to a simpler word which i should probably do more often but in your case it's your first name it's my last name yeah you have to call me sarah sarah it's easy instead of scizarro see there we go scizarro yeah so anyway but see i'll still flub it though even when i know what i'm doing anyway um okay so let's let's let's get into it um let's first start out this is part two of 10 but of two of two in this in in this series at least we'll come back to it at a certain point but we'll we'll try to put a book in in these in these first two um so this is part two that uh coach sarah and i've been doing on strength training for ultra runners and if for those of you that are just tuning into this one we did a previous podcast on this whole concept of is this a right training modality for you is it a right training modality from an injury prevention standpoint and is it the right training modality from an ergogenic standpoint so if you haven't listened to that and you want to determine if you are a good candidate i'd refer back to that podcast first um this one is going to be all about programming how to actually do it correctly we're going to kind of get into some nitty-gritty but first before we start out let's give like the quick elevator pitch sarah on what we discussed the last time which that podcast would have been released last week yes so we discussed the difference between strength training for running performance

and strength training for injury prevention and more corrective work and where would that what's the difference between the two and is strength training for performance something you want to adopt throughout your training cycle is that a smart idea and we defined strength training performance uh in based on all of the studies we reviewed on it's usually a one to five sets of one to five reps very very very heavy weight generally giving about a two to four percent increase in running economy and vo2 max and then we discussed whether or not that was a benefit that would transfer over to ultra running and are there alternative methods that maybe would get better performance return for the amount of work involved i love those caveats okay i'm going to add to the caveats as well so the the few percent i'll even summarize the one to four percent a little bit more so that the few percent uh improvements i think you can categorize across a number of different things you mentioned vo2 max running economy those are the two kind of top physiological improvements that we look at but also there have been performance types of improvements whether that's 10k time trial or time to exhaustion test and they all still fit within this few percent range no matter how you slice and dice it one of the one of the things that i've always been

curious about is how any of those translate into ultra running performance and that is a totally kind of different topic but i think suffice it to say whenever we're when we're talking about strength training it's plausible that you could get a few percent improvement in raw performance if you incorporate strength training i honestly think that the biggest caveat to that and we talked about that this in the first uh in the first podcast is the vast majority not all but the vast majority of those studies are done a on college age men and most people that we're working with sarah you and i are working with are not college age men and b most of the time not all of the time somebody's going to throw one or two or three studies at me that violates this and that's totally fine most of the time the study intervention or the strength training intervention is done in addition to the run programming and so that the way that the a b groups work out that they're comparing is the a group the a group does running and the b group does the exact same running plus strength training so in that sense it's an additional form of training and you could say that that's just like doing additional miles additional intervals or whatever so i always add those those kind of those types of caveats when we're when we're looking at the research is that most of it is done on college age men always have to consider that

and the second one is is is most not all most of the research has been done where the strength training is in addition to the primary modality whether it's running or cycling or whatever it is correct okay those are our caveats for to start to summarize this to to to kind of summarize it so let's assume sarah that somebody listened to the last podcast they're they're trying to become kind of well educated on this and they decide hey i'm a candidate to incorporate strength training as an ergogenic aid we're going to keep kind of like that category first i want to incorporate strength training into my into my training program as a whole as an ergogenic aid and let's assume that we have the perfect scenario we have time to work with we have an athlete that is a college-aged male which is when all the research is based off of sarah's you guys can't see this is a failure of audio she's rolling over in her chair right now laughing we can assume that the that the that the athlete is a college-age male and they're going to adapt to this stress right and they have unlimited they have unlimited amount of time or they have enough time to where they can actually incorporate it let's go through kind of like phase by phase or piece by piece what part of or so what that strength training would actually look like so let's kind of first start out with is what would be a a good or an ideal amount of time for you to get a new athlete and to say i'm going to start to

incorporate you've already made the yes decision i'm going to start to incorporate strength training with that with that with that particular athlete what's the rough right amount of time and then we'll walk through that timeline so from starting to the end of the race so let's say if we're going to go from the site the the whole situation from beginning to end eight to nine months okay let's say my athletes event is in july or august and we're starting in december okay okay january okay eight to nine months so correct well how many how many different compartments do you want to do you want to divide this eight or nine months into i think three three we can do three performance kind of in the middle and then more of that injury prevention at the end okay perfect so let's make it nine months so the math doesn't get too hard for me so we can do kind of three months at a time right is that fair okay we'll do we'll do three months at a time so you get your perfect athlete sarah sarah and your perfect scenario they want to start strength training what does the first three months look like and we're going to go through set and rep combination we're going to go through the types of different exercise set and rep combination and intensity i think that's the the right way to structure it first and then we'll go through like the different types of exercises so why don't you walk us through that yeah so if we're starting in the very beginning um we can also add a caveat that this person might have a little strength training background they might not we'll see but um so in the beginning for performance enhancement um a lot of what we're going to be looking at is three to five reps three to five sets so this is going

to be 87 to 93 percent of your one rep max this is going to be heavy heavy lifting um it's generally more compound movement and it can include skill-based movements like plyometric explosive movements are usually found in this phase for performance enhancement and this is the time where you really and the reason i like to do this in the beginning way away from our event is because there's more of a cost-benefit balance here so the hard hard training you're going to be doing in the gym does not translate well as your run volume increases which as we go along this timeline will kind of make more sense so we generally program with a push pull hinge squat carry type of situation and let's pause really quick push pull squat hinge carry refers to like a category of different exercises correct these are movements or movements i guess is a better way to put it so a push can be five or six different things a pull can be five or six different things a squat could be five or different things a hinge or hip hinge is where you'll hear that in straight training as well could be several different things and a carry can be manipulated several different ways but we'll refer back to these categories i think realizing and i want the audience to understand this as well because they might not have a robust strength training background realizing that each of those categories could be one of a few different exercises or set or if you're in strength training it could be 50 different exercises for a pull right yeah yeah so okay to kind of simplify it when you when you think of a push you often think of

like a bench press or a push up or a push press and a pull can be like a cable row or a barbell row or a chin up where you're pulling your body or pulling a weight towards you a hinge romanian deadlift something like that squat can be a variation of a squat goblet squat front squat and the like and then a carry a good example of that is like a farmer's carry where you carry a weight around i know why do we have to call it a farmer's carry why can't we just call it carry the weight from this end of the room to that like what like what is it about farmers like you're carrying your your heavy hay bales and then there's a butler's carrier yeah butler's carry carries it above yeah so they give it cute names so that yeah so then again you feel badass in the gym you're a farmer you're not just you're not just in the gym coop you're a farmer hey i worked on an experiment farm for two years i and i've seen firsthand how hard work that they're the they're one of the only professions in the u.s right now that actually still work for a living not the only but one of the only people where they actually physically work for a living that's another story yeah and so that's why again farmers carry because you're working yeah okay right sorry i i i i definitely digress the conversation there let's get back into the first into the first three into the first three months let's kind of recap it really quick sets wraps intensity and then let's go over the the different types of exercises that would be good in this in this phase okay so back to sets and sets and reps we're looking at three to

five reps three to five sets about 87 to 93 percent of your one rep max so this is going to be pretty heavy this is really you're really working here it's hard um it's hard yeah you're not you should not have if you can do three to five reps you're you're tanked by that fifth one you're not like yeah i could have done another four or five i mean it's that's right there um and it's going to be a lot of these compound movements to include the push pull and squat and carry okay let's do two examples of each type of movement that would be applicable in this particular phase starting with we'll go push first just give it give two and give like a one sentence description of how each one of those looks oh as far as intensity or no no no like actual actual exercise yeah yeah oh yeah a bench press back on a bench yep yep that'd be a push so you can use a barbell or dumbbells lay back on a bench push the weight away from you bring it back down yep okay what's another example a pole a pole no no no let's stay on push yeah oh a push um push press so that could be seated or standing dumbbells held at shoulder length push the weight up bring it down yep that can also be done with a barbell yeah easy these are really pretty easy okay as far as what they entail a pole can be a cable row so you stand at a cable machine have a handle get into a nice a nice split squat stance and pull the row the movement towards you like you're rowing but with a cable you can also do a chin-up or a assisted

chin-up so if you're if you're badass and you can do chin-ups more of the power to you otherwise i wanted to mention this i've met my hero in the gym on monday who is this it's this guy i think his name i think i'm gonna space on his name i think his name is barry he's 82 he's 82 years old and he comes in the gym every single monday he looks he looks absolutely fantastic and he probably spends about 90 minutes in the gym so he's there before i get there and he's still there after i leave because i'm only there for like 40 or 60 minutes and like i said early early 80s and he he's he always goes hard like he'll just pick a machine and pick what's seemingly a random weight and he'll just go until he can't go anymore but monday i i will swear on my mother's grave i saw him knock out nine real chin-ups wow or sorry pull-ups pull-ups we all we all need to be buried nine nine that is amazing he comes in every day and like this long sleeve dress shirt and khaki pants i know so sweet and after he knocked all those out i was just like i gotta introduce myself to this guy because he's my hero and so we just sat down and talked for five or ten minutes or whatever i was like dude i gave him a fist bump and he walked out of the gym it was awesome it's so awesome oh i love that i love seeing strength carry over an age you know so it's not one of those things that you lose and so that's fantastic i love

to hear that okay so there we go we all have something to aspire to berry just remember berry next time you're in the gym um so then moving on to like a hinge would be like a romanian deadlift which you can do single or double leg um so you're gonna stand you're gonna hinge from the hips which i will say that as a personal trainer and coach the hinge can be one of the most difficult things to coach actually in the gym because most people turn it into a squat so if you're not sure on how to properly do a romanian deadlift that's definitely an exercise that you're going to want to grab a trainer grab somebody who knows what they're doing um to get that proper position of a hinge because you're not going to get the full benefit of the movement that's very uh hamstring glute dominant so you're going to take the weight in front of you hinge the hips back the weights go towards the ground your back remains flat in neutral position and then you're going to drive up and bring your weight the weight back up as you stand into a standing position and so it's basically more of like a stretch it feels more of a stretch on the hamstrings but it's activating that muscle group what do you think so when you're working with athletes what do you think is like the safest version of that like you get somebody with no prior strength training experience and you know you want them to do some type of hinge what is like the safest way to start out with because there's a lot of different variations of this there are uh honestly the safest way to learn how to hinge is even just using like a broomstick and a wall and and and like no weight at all until you can get that hinge um or alternatively you can use a cable

as well so you can go up to a cable machine and attach the cable the handle to the weight stack and go into that hinge position and you still have that weight as you pull up but it's not going to stress it's not going to put that weight on the low back in the front of you as much with the cable at like its lowest position is that what you're thinking okay yeah that's okay i've seen people yeah yeah so as you go down it you know the weight pulls you down and then as you come up you're you're pulling the weight stack up got it but a lot of people can benefit of just practicing this movement with a broomstick and body weight so oh yeah um yeah yeah i mean it's like with anything you don't wait a movement until you can do the movement properly sure body weight yep i mean that's how that's how uh that's initially when i was taught olympic lifts and i know this is different than a than a hinge um when i was taught olympic lifts is actually after i i went through a full collegiate program which is actually rather ironic because i went to a big you know big track and field university and um we did no olympic lifting there um we did we did strength training uh but it was all like what i would call just like normal types of strength training we didn't do any plyometrics or any olympic lifts or anything like that which is you you see rather prevalently in a collegiate system right now and it wasn't actually until i started working with cts where we had a strength training coach um by the name of meg stone who who anybody who's been in the strength training game for any period of

time will recognize her and or her husband mike stone's uh name in terms of just developing particularly olympic lifting and other types of programming in the in the olympic in the olympic sports so anyway i was very fortunate to have her as a one of the early mentors and she taught all of us all the skinny little cyclists and runners and triathletes in our coaching group like how to actually do olympic lifts with a broomstick and it was hilarious and i was horrible at it um uh but um to to your point like her what she was trying to drill into us was the movement first before we actually waited it and we probably did that broomstick exercise for i don't know we met maybe three times a week for two or three weeks before she would actually like feel confident enough to in us to like load the bar up and yeah i mean it just goes to show you like when you're doing those things like it's no there's no penalty for starting out a little easier no and i mean doesn't that transfer to to running too i mean as we build up our endurance and our base so it's it's there's no difference there um okay so then moving on from the hinge you have your squat which i think you know we've all been doing this since we were little kids squatting down um below parallel is fine some people were taught that that is not good um but if you've got good form that's not a problem and there are you can do your traditional back squat with a barbell on your back placing the barbell on your back squatting squatting down behind you driving up there's also a goblet squat where you can hold a dumbbell

in front of you and squat that way that's very similar to a barbell front squat as well so there are many variations of the squat would you also include like a reverse lunge or a lunge in this i actually have a subgroup with that which i was going to kind of talk about a little bit here of single leg work which would include like step ups reverse lunges you could but i think if we kind of separate single leg work into its own category as we kind of move into middle season work that can be really beneficial as well okay okay so we'll stick remember and i probably need to remind myself this is still the first three months yes this nine month program okay so we're doing we're we're doing bilateral movement still at this point especially for a squat and yes for simplification yes we are okay perfect all right so let's move on next category uh and that's the carry so you can do your farmer's carry your butler's carry you there's all the different carry variations and i would add on that one you could also do something like a rotational work like a wood chopper with a ball or the cable doesn't have to be just carrying work and and the carry i think a lot of people this is probably the category of exercises that most runners either have no familiarity with or look at it and go i don't understand the purpose it's easy it's easy to just look at a squat and say okay yeah look my legs are working right or it's easy to look at a bench press and say okay i'm gonna work my arms but with a carry it's not that like it's not it's not that easy to visually ascertain what is actually

going on so for the uninformed audience out there let's kind of go through like why why do a carry yeah so a carry helps with basically you're working on spinal stabilization and anti-rotation so you can carry a dumbbell in each hand we'll use a farmer's carry as an example and as you walk you know as a controlled pace your body will want to rotate and shift and you're using your core to stabilize your spine and fight that rotation now if you want to make it harder you can hold a dumbbell on one side just an offset load and then you're working even harder to keep that body from turning towards the side with the weight so it's one of those things that it's not as when you see it it's it's kind of like what why why are you just carrying things around and then you do it and you go oh i i get it you'll feel it so i i love so i love the vocabulary spinal stabilization and fighting rotation because it's not core work yeah it's not a it's not a cruncher no i'm serious because a lot of people will take if you just take the program that you laid out right push pull hinge squat they'll do that but instead of for this last category of carry they'll do some sort of core work they'll do sit up they'll do some silly like bicycle kicks and things like that to quote unquote you're laughing i can tell um once again another failure of audio you can laugh out loud sarah but they'll do something to like improve their quote unquote core which

yeah i i don't for the life of me i don't i've never been able and i've tried maybe it's a feeble attempt but i've tried to like trace that word back to where where its origins were and it's actually kind of hard to figure out like where i don't go ahead i don't know the origin like it the core because the core technically is like rib cage down to pelvic girdle front to back i mean it's the whole it's and but most people think i gotta do my core work i gotta go do my sit-ups or my crunches or and and it's fine if you want to do a you know a little but the problem is people do too much of that movement and it's not doesn't have a lot of transfer benefit that is like is hugely that is a huge statement sarah why don't you say that again because i kind of interrupted the last piece oh no yeah so it doesn't there's no real world transfer of doing crunches to then getting out running how is that going there's no real world transfer for that people it's more of an aesthetic or when they feel the burn but when you do something that actively asks your body to react in a way that will be called upon when you're actually working in real life because i'm going to guess that you don't stand there and do crunches in real life you know but you might be running and slip on a rock and you gotta your body has to correct and your body fights that rotation your core activates that's reflexive strength that's true strength okay if anybody takes anything away from the podcast it's that right there is that a lot of the core work that we do or that what's viewed as

traditional core work probably has very little if any transfer into the real world so you can throw away your crunches and pick up something heavy and walk across the room there's your substitute right then and there there you go and it will work your core and it will and it'll work your core in a more functional way okay yeah okay so we've got our program for the first three months three to five sets of three to five reps of one in each of those categories if yeah we'll keep it simple yeah absolutely it's all you really need yep we're keeping it simple you get in out of it you're going to have a longer rest period and chances are because you're working at that intensity in that rep range you're going to be doing a lot of stress and muscular damage to the body there's going to be soreness is what that translates to is you're going to be sore yeah you're going to be sore so okay let's bring up two things with that first off i want you to clarify what longer rest period is in this context yeah so this at these rep range could be anywhere from 90 seconds to even two minutes of rest perfect are you a big fan are you a big fan of doing like the alternating uh exercises so instead of doing them in order push pull hinge squat you would do like push which would be arms right squat and you could do it immediately after just to kind of like save time because it's a different muscle group you know what i'm talking about i've always i've talked to different strength training like gurus about this and the opinions vary i just kind of want to know yours yeah it does vary i would say in this phase i mean

honest your rest should be rest and if you can go from a push to a squat and get the full max out of of each exercise then there's no problem but if you're pushing so hard on bench that you can't maintain the form to be able to squat because you're so fatigued in the upper body to be able to hold that position incorrectly then you might need to have more of that rest between i like that answer okay however yeah well we as we move along we can discuss how that does apply into the different phases perfect perfect okay so rest is roughly 90 seconds all right this is hard and the context of the timing of this phase i think is critically important because you're getting a runner roughly nine months out from their event let's couple that with the type of running that they'll actually be doing at this time so they're doing hard strength training yeah what does the running actually look like let's just stylize it because we can go down the rabbit hole on this as well but let's just stylize the running too this is off season i'm air quoting right now for those that can't see me this is um we are not doing any heavy heavy volume at this point in running so there's you're not pulling huge crazy volume weeks and long long crazy training runs and you're not doing a ton of really uh focus intensity okay this is kind of like a nice if you're going to pair this with your running this is more of that foundational just you're you're still getting some miles under those legs but you're not doing a

ton of uh quality i don't like to use the word not quality because everything's quality well let me stylize it for a second the the training stress from the strength training is high and the training stress from the run training is relatively low see so they're perfect simple perfect yeah so they kind of no but i think the reason that i want the reason that i want to bring that up in turn the reason that i want to bring that up is because there's always a running context and as we mentioned in the caveats and in the first pot and in the first podcast whenever you're lifting hard and heavy and in particular when you're lifting hard hard and heavy something has to give you can't compile stress on stress on stress and i i mentioned and i think this was in the audiogram that i'm going to send out well it's in the podcast but it'll be in the i'm getting confused on my timing it doesn't matter the audiogram that i will send out for the podcast that we previously did gave this vague allusion to like what i'm doing in the strength training world or what i'm doing personally from a strength training perspective right now and i absolutely have to take running off the table some run not completely off the table i have to take some running off the table in order to lift hard and heavy so yes and that's fine that's fine that's just the reality this is the time to do it yeah and that's the point this is the time to do it is in these early stages your run volume is low the run or you know the stress is low from the running the stimulus that you're getting there so that you are able to have this higher stress slash stimulus

from your strength training there's no there's no competition between the two at this point yep okay awesome i think we've encapsulated the first phase pretty well three to five reps three to five sets lift hard lift heavy um rest rest rest of 90 seconds do it when your run volume is low uh what else do we need to talk about before we move on to the next one you think we got it i think that's oh oh oh oh here we go oh what about rest in terms of like a rest week or a rest phase yeah so it's kind of prevalent in the strength training world where you'll do kind of a periodized you know you have your macro and your micro cycles and you'll do like a three to four to five week build with a with a deload week and that's usually it's phased so you might work with the same exercises within this phase have a deload and then you might say maybe you've been doing a push-up in your first phase and then the second phase you move to a bench press within this phase of that same rep so you're still using the same movements you really focus on the movement mechanics and then you take a deload which is still you're still lifting but the volume is decreased and then you start a new phase and you start over the volume in terms of the sets and reps or the volume in terms of the total amount of weight that you're lifting it's the sets and reps in that deload okay so that's gonna you might only do you know you're gonna do fewer sets of reps kind of it's kind of an active reset week okay so instead

of like three by five you'll do like two by three or yeah or two yeah you'll just that'll be decreased so okay yeah cool no i think that's important because it's it's analogous to what most people will uh what most people will be more comfortable with with their run training right where they do three weeks hard i hate this architecture they do three weeks hard all of the time and then they do one like three or five day period that's quote unquote easy but it's similar in strength training you need to take a deloading phase yes which is the vocabulary in the strength training world for recovery week deload recovery week yes okay just to strength training vocabulary that's another question we make things so hard well i've always said this it's because it's one of the it's one of the very first forms of sport and training for sport is is they might have not called it strength training back in the you know early greek days back in the early greek days but because it's been around for so long it's just had the opportunity to be contrived in a gazillion different ways so agreed okay so we got our first phase cool we're cool with that let's move on to the next three months first three months were months like nine months out from the event now we're like six months out from the event yeah so so this is kind of middle season so we're that we start to transition away um and this is where a lot of our listeners are going to be right now i have a feeling yeah i agree it's going to be kind of in that yeah so if you're you're just coming right now

this is kind of where you're looking to be if your race is kind of six months out that window um this is going to be less focusing on that heavy that performance of the that rep range that we had before this is going to be more of a three rep or three set eight to twelve reps area so you're going to be lifting enough weight that you can leave one or two reps left in the tank but you're not aiming to go to failure or up to that 97 max so you're going to walk away and be like yeah you know i had a couple more in there not holy crap peel me off the floor um yeah so you're still can focus on those movements but this is when i also start to incorporate um if i didn't already is when you can start to work on those reverse lunges the single leg work as well um it's a good time to be kind of shoring up any weaknesses you might be finding as your run volume will be starting to do they start to kind of meet in the middle as your run volume increases your volume of your lifting now although one could say but if i'm doing eight to twelve reps that's higher volume than what we did before but if you were doing five sets of five that was potentially 15 reps right yeah i kind of view it as like overall stress load exactly so it's and that exactly so it's not only the rep range but it's the overall stress of the bodies because you're using less weight you're putting less stress on the body yeah it's hard for a lot of people though that aren't that don't like coach coach people either in in running or in strength training for a living to like internalize what those set rep

combinations actually mean in terms of stress load but i think the point that you're making is is that the weight the weight lifting like the burden that the weight lifting is placing on the athlete is being reduced and the burden that the run that the running is being on is being placed on the athlete is increased it's like a teeter-totter right they've always got to kind of like balance each other out correct okay okay cool so we've got this eight to three sets of eight to twelve construction let's kind of go through the different movement categories and what examples of those might be in this phase you already kind of mentioned the reverse lunge as opposed to a squat right let's try to move through them all and give a couple of examples a great one i mean you can never go wrong in any phase of good old push-ups if we want to do a push movement it's full body um i think everybody should try to build to be able to do strict push-ups yeah i just think it's a great you know that again that's true strength that's your body you're pushing it away from the floor um even the the women out there no girl push-ups you think everybody should go to regular straight up push-ups i think everybody can aim to build there there you're not going to be there on day one but i think that's something that you should aim i think that's a great goal and i think for most people it's very very accessible and attainable okay cool so and you don't need any equipment for that one yeah um and so you can also be doing dumbbell push uh push um dumbbell presses or dumbbell push presses you can still be

incorporating those exercises that you were doing before you could still very well be doing a push press you're just doing a lighter weight and you're doing slightly more reps for it okay so it's gonna fit you know yeah uh pole again any of those polar you know cable row barbell row dumbbell rotational rows there's i like rows there's lots of row options there i don't know if anybody's catching on inverted rows yeah i feel like i feel like bubba gump right now with forrest gump i should get a t-shirt with all the rows and then the hinge and a great you know by now hopefully you've really gotten that hinge pattern down so you might be looking into even doing like a single leg romanian deadlift getting really sassy with it you know it's so funny you mentioned that because i know so many people and i know coaches that do this as well and i think it's a big error that start out with the single leg rdl when they're teaching somebody as opposed to a bilateral rdl simply because the weight is less and they feel that it's a little bit safer and i just kind of look at i'm like i get what you're like i get i get it i get it i get it like you're trying to be the argument i can see i can see the argument but i think that it's it's harder because of the balance component yeah and i've so i've never agreed with trying to teach somebody if they've never done any strength training before i've never i've never agreed with the philosophy of trying to teach anybody in a unilateral type of way i always start with a traditional romanian deadlift or a

traditional hinge and then progress that the single leg is a progression to me um because of the balance issue and also just the mechanics of the movement yeah so i'm sure there's an outlier out there of someone who can get it better on one leg um but generally if you can't do a regular traditional romanian deadlift you can't get that hinge pattern down it's going to be slightly you know significantly more challenging in a single leg position okay um so anything different in the carry let's kind of move through the categories again anything different in a carry carry you'll be carrying it for longer oh wait we didn't mention this in the first part so normally in strength training we we talk about the volume in terms of set and wrap combinations it's kind of different with a carry so in the heavy phase what does the carry look like like is it it's gonna be time or distance or steps or what it can be all three so you could you could program it like 20 steps or you know if you belong to one of those fancy gyms that has a turf or a marked off area or to the water fountain and back um but the weight is going to be heavier so you're generally going to be doing the weight that you can control for say 20 seconds or okay that's important because we're talking to ultra runners here and they're going to view 20 seconds it's like 20 why would i do anything for 20 seconds right like i know ultra runners should do strides for 40 seconds and i just like i bang my head against the wall i'm like that's not a stride you might as well just call it an interval at that point yeah but um so that's neither here nor there but the point is is when you're care well like during this heavy phase the

first kind of three months that carry is it's just shorter and it's probably it's actually probably less than 20 seconds it can be yeah it's you know it might even be just 10 steps one direction 10 steps the other yeah but it's it's going to be heavy yeah you will get calluses yeah yeah you don't need to go outside to do it you don't need a 400 meter track you don't need to carry around dumbbells around a 400 meter track you don't need to be on the basketball court okay okay good so in this in this phase in the the three to eight by 10 or eight to 12 reps uh phase that carry just gets a little bit longer gets a little bit longer so you might do it 20 to 30 steps turn around okay come back yeah um and this is a good time to start playing with other forms of carrying i know we mentioned it in the first part but maybe you couldn't control a good weight overhead in a butler's carry so this would be a good opportunity to do a different variation of the carry because you're going to be using you know more reps so you kind of give your permission you've built up that core strength and you're more comfortable in these different movement patterns yeah okay let's talk about rest rest between sets and then let's talk about the overall like like monthly or weekly rest architecture yeah so rest between sets is going to be generally 45 to 60 seconds because it's shorter shorter than the first phase it's shorter okay yep yep so it's going to be shorter um and you won't you're not going

to have that feeling that you need it as much you're so and this is like we talked about earlier this is a good time where you could do your push-ups and then go and do your squat you can kind of pair super set we call it super setting yes freaking strength training super setting and you get the lingo and you can super set in all areas but this is when super setting plays out i think to its best this is its best side is right in this rep range because the well because the intensity is real is a little bit lower so you're not paying as much of a penalty for the lack of rest yeah you're not sacrificing another movement yeah i hate the super set because it keeps like one is dumb it's like okay whatever super super super yeah super but you see people do it three ways so they'll do like a push a squat and a twist push squat twist push squat twist i can't say that very fast push squat twist and then they're done with their three sets yeah or they might do a push squat pull yeah but i mean at that point it's like you're just circuit training yeah which is totally different or might be in an orange theory class that's another kettle of fish that's totally yeah that's it okay yeah okay so so let's encapsulate this really quick three sets of eight to twelve reps this is in the middle you've got six months out from the event anywhere from six months to three months out from the event three sets uh eight to twelve reps uh four thirty to forty five seconds between so it's a 45 to 60 moderately

heavy load you could use the exact same exercises in the first phase but if you wanted to make particularly the legs maybe more specific or you know unilateral that would be a good option there um i would be remiss if we didn't go back this is bad interviewing by me what are the what is the weekly frequency and you can let's go to the heavy phase let's go back in time to the heavy phase first and then we can see if that changes in this phase yeah so to keep things simple we're going to assume that people are doing a full body programming on this on this because otherwise you could literally all at once because otherwise there are a way to break that up into an upper lower split or a push pull split so if we're doing a full body split in that first phase easily three three days three days a week yep and if you chose to do it as a push pull split or a upper lower split you could do even more four to five days and there are some people that do that and and the split just to clarify for people that just got confused there because i got i did a little bit no that's no disrespect to you sarah no no no no since i'm once again i'm not a strength training expert so it's hard for me to follow at the same time it would be doing the push exercises on one day and then the pull exercises the next day and then the push exercises yes what some somewhere down the week and the pull exercises another way down the week or another day down the week okay okay or all upper on one day lower on the other that's that's

more however yeah but in this performance aspect you're probably going to see either a full body or a push okay okay so we'll we'll let's just assume for the listeners going forward that we're doing everything on one day so the frequency in the first day the first phase is three days per week okay frequency in the second phase can still be three however most people are starting to find near the end of this phase that two days is adequate okay perfect this brings us to our next topic which we alluded to kind of in the uh in the intro here now that there's this balancing of run stress load and strength training stress load where we're starting in this phase from a running perspective we're starting to incorporate maybe intervals certainly harder runs and certainly longer runs how would one go about arranging a week and we'll just let's just use a two day per week just to keep it super simple how would one go about arranging a two day per week strength training program balancing out the hard and the long runs at the same time like when should those strength training when should those strength training days be incorporated into the weekly program are we assuming the long run is on like a saturday yeah it doesn't matter yeah just like let's just say i would go ahead yeah i was gonna say i would give you know if we're in this middle season i would give

at least 48 hours between your long run and your lifting okay yeah um so you know you could lift on a tuesday thursday long run on a saturday that's okay but i wouldn't i would try to avoid lifting the day before a long run or a high quality run where you want to show up with really fresh legs yep there shouldn't be much fatigue here it shouldn't be much of a problem but our focus is at this point now shifting more towards the running and the stress that that's placing on us and we're moving away on the stress that the strength is giving us we're moving more into our run that's our that's our focus now um you you want to build the training around the modality that you're focusing on yeah the way that i've the way that i've i'll go ahead i was gonna say we're now basically what we're doing is the the lifting is adjunct to the running the running drives everything the lifting is just helping to support to keep us healthier as we move on sure well and so so two pieces is one compromising the run quality would be an error in my opinion especially during this phase and it's a little bit of more of a nuanced discussion in the first phase but the way that i've always viewed this with athletes that that i work with is you want to give the athlete as much opportunity to recover before the next hard or long or important run that they have and wherever the strength training needs to go

to to suit that need is where it needs to be foot where it needs to be put in the perfect scenario that means that you do a hard workout in the morning and then you do your strength training that evening and then you have which means the strength training is quote-unquote compromised and that's fine it's a compromise that that i'd be willing to take for almost every athlete that means you at the next day to go easy the day probably even the day after that to go easier endurance and then sometime down the road to you know two days down the road or whatever you have your next important workout but the the the point of all of that is is that daily architecture enables as much space as possible from the strength training day to the next hard day now you could say that okay that makes that single day too hard you know doing the two workouts in one day i you know i think that's a little bit more of an individual response and how much are you pushing on the strength training and things like that but i think the point that both sarah and i are trying to like communicate it in like a slightly different way is that or the two points i guess is that the run programming has to take priority and therefore the strength training you don't want to interfere or anything else right um and go ahead oh go ahead no no finish your point sorry and in order to do that you want to give us as much space as possible between the strength training workout and then the next hard workout go sarah yes and kind of well and just to piggyback on your comment about you know do i do the harder you know the strength training on my hard workout you know my hard run day and somebody might argue

that you're making that hard day hard but that allows you to have your easy day easy exactly and and that's what i think you know that's a better way to look at it i think so that your body gets that time to recover yeah um versus having a really high stressor every single day exactly well i tell you what i tell the story all the time i cannot tell you how many coaches inside and outside of cts a lot outside of cts to be honest with you a lot of coaches who their athletes have made this error of doing either moderately hard or a really hard strength training day on a rest day which is a total violation of a rest day like a rest day should be rest strength training is not rest or thank you or or they do it on an easy day and it kind of compromises that easy day and like i said there could be some argument to that architecture depending upon like the coach athlete situation but i think the point that we're trying to drive home is is that you're just trying to give as much space as possible to the to the hard workouts it really gets complicated we are not getting into this right now but i just wrote about it in a blog that came out yesterday and in ultra running magazines in an ultra money ultra running uh magazine article for march if you decide to do block style training with your athletes where you're doing two back-to-back run hard days that's when the strength training architecture gets really difficult to start to incorporate and you got to be like smart and creative

yeah and once again that's good sir oh no i'm sorry it's that is that's when it's really key to have one thing good coaching and and how to structure that in programming or good self-awareness and that's such a nuance to that that's not something that's easily there's not an easy balance there yeah it's tough because like the same you know one to few percent proposition that we just made with strength training in terms of performance improvement you can make that same proposition with block style training and so it's like where like where are you looking to get these performance benefits out of that's i just i just think it's fascinating because in a lot of ways it is a pick and choose thing because there's only so much room for stress okay that was a tangent on weekly architecture but i think that's a beautiful way to segue into the next three months let's do it let's do it that was a good segue that was a good segue sarah you're a total pro and i think the key is the fact that our run stress is increasing so now we need to pick our strength training how do we balance that right that nuance of run strength so we're getting a lot either we're getting really much closer to our event date um we're getting some peak weeks in there we're getting some really tougher tempo runs intervals things are happening and there's a little tweaking we're doing right before the last two to three months um generally this is more like that two to three month range i'd even say err on the side of

the two month is we start doing more i don't like to say accessory work but this is really getting into more of that injury prevention slash corrective that we talked about the last time yep so this is going to be not heavy weights in some cases there may not be much weight at all this is going to be a lot of balancing out weaknesses we've got it's all supportive all this is doing is helping to support the running that we're doing whether that means it's only one day a week or maybe two days a week um that might be monster band walks it might be i know monster band walks are like my favorite favorite activity to hate i know it's the bird it's the bird it's all about the booty that's what you know well yeah body part right now we didn't even get onto glute bridges but the the point here is if this is like as we're ramping up the running volume and as we're getting closer to our events we're taking the stress of the strength training off the table as much as we can so anything we're doing in the gym is helping to work on any weaknesses we might be finding we're having so maybe we're having we're discovering we're having a little bit of issues with some it band so we want to start incorporating some things to work through that and and so on and so forth here's what i love about the way that you position that is that you're positioning this the last three months here as accomplishing something right you're accomplishing something that's additive to the run work

because all too often what we think about in this in these types of with this type of training and right now we're talking about strength training but run training can actually fall into this category as well as a maintenance phase and i hear this term get thrown a lot around a lot and it it quite frankly irritates the crap out of me because i have not i've been coaching for almost 20 years now i've not had one single athlete come up to me one time ever in the history of my career nor have i ever made it a priority for an athlete to maintain anything we are always trying to improve yeah now that doesn't mean like pile on workload and you know you always you know more work more work more work harder faster more mileage and things like that no absolutely but everything should be in the goal of progression not maintenance i'm not in the maintenance business i'm in the betterment business i mean come on hell yeah and and exactly and i think this is a great time so and if we look at our whole nine months that we've been working with you almost go from least specific and more general to more specific for the individual right so this part as as with running so this is the part where where in the beginning things might look very very similar between two different runners between the basic compound movements we might get to this point where things look significantly different between runner a and

runner b because runner a might have an issue that they we need to address yeah over here and runner b might have more of an upper body core weakness where this person has a posterior chain and lateral hip weakness so it you really are starting to dial in for the specific individual yeah and i think i think for for self-coached runners out there that are listening to this this is the hardest to like what do i do like i don't know what i don't know what that i don't know what that means it's it's we're in the business and we can either get up get in front of a person and start to tease those things out or we can ask them you know just over the phone and start to tease those things out but for self coach runner out there what is how did how would they go about determining what the specific programming would look like since it is so individual yeah and that can be a challenge for sure um so if as most of our runners that are listening to this are going to be kind of coming in through that middle phase so they still have some time to kind of think about this right as we approach this ladder stage so this is the point where maybe as you're running has progressed you notice that you tend to get it band issues to kind of go back to that you maybe you get some soreness in your hips maybe your feet you have a lot of problems weak feet balance issues these are okay what can i do for that so um if you have you tend to find that you've got maybe discrepancy between strength between your two legs you're going to be doing a lot more like step downs and step ups and single leg work and

lateral work to work on the ladder because running even trail running is a lot of very same over and over movements in kind of a similar plane it's not as bad as road running right in that sagittal plane but but it's still a lot of that repetitive um so we want to kind of buffer the weaknesses so it's it's hard to be very specific but i know but i think for most people okay you may just throw out some things that most people yeah let's just give like so if if and as coaches so for those of you this is hard to do as a coach yeah so for those of you listening it's one of the really big challenges within coaching especially the way that we do it at cts is we take a very individualized approach to our entire process we keep our coach athlete ratios fairly relatively low we don't have any templated programs or any stock here's your first week of foundation running or anything like that to pull from like everything's kind of built up by hand and the way that we the way that we train our coaches is to is we give them a just an overall generalized philosophy and we in in moreover we're teaching them how to individualize that to each and every athlete and as a consequence of that what becomes difficult is and i have this problem when i write actually because i realize i'm writing for a very big audience but as a consequence of that one of the challenges that we have as coaches in particular cts coaches is making these big blanket statements so all all trail runners should be doing

this one stair step exercise or all trail runners should be doing these five type like exercises like that's really really hard for us to do because we know how how important this individualization component is so that's that's that's a little bit of a background of while we're struggling but we're still going to try we're still going to try we're still going to try yeah the five point magazine article like do these things right you know i have a love hate relationship with those because like those lists when i read them i'm like but then i go back and i'm like damn it i've got to kind of do the same thing on this yeah anyway and i struggle with that but i will say and again talking in generalities here um that most people run or ultra runners included tend to be very weak in their glutes and hamstrings okay you know so there's a lot of we sit a lot average you know chances are most people have a job they sit at they're not a farmer they're not working hard all day um so even at this point this is a great phase to be doing like stability ball bridge and curls so you're laying on your back calves are on a stability ball raise your hips up dig your heels in bring the ball towards your your glutes and then extend out bring your hips back down um that can be pretty challenging a lot of people wobble around on that they they find like there's a core back to that stabilization so you might just start with a bridge calves on the ball palms up on your back raise your your butt up in the air your your body up into the air

hold it and come back down um that's a great place to start um lateral step ups are one of my favorite everybody knows about the traditional step up but a lateral step up is a good um movement to do to work on our lateral hip strength as well as you know our balance and uh that movement um i'll have to completely i'll have to completely concur that i like a lateral step up for a trail runner as opposed to a forward step up yeah like i just not a lot of people are doing them no you'd be surprised at how many athletes i have where i'll program a lateral step up and they're like i've never done this before i have to go on that plane bruh yeah um and on that note you know again love hate relationship with the bands and the booty and the monster band walks but for some people there is a lot of value to putting a i like the cloth bands the stretchy like mini bands and putting it you know usually above the knee or some people put it right above the ankle eight to 12 steps laterally one direction then i like to do eight to 12 steps forward kind of at a diagonal go laterally back the other direction eight to 12 steps backwards yep um it really yeah and it's amazing how many runners are very very weak in those areas because they're small muscle groups too they're very very small um in the hip the deep six in the hip there those are those muscles that make up the hip complex um i still think great great place for this is just if you want overall strength is push-ups are great because a lot of people start to

especially in long ultra run events get very um they have a lot of weakness in their upper body a lot of fatigue sets in so this is when our non-traditional core and some body work can play a good part so your rotations your carries um medicine ball slams are fun yeah you know you can you can have fun and feel like a badass you know so um yeah so those are just an example and then some it even just comes down to doing some of the exercises you would have done like say a bulgarian split squat or reverse lunge your lunge you're just doing that uh with body weight now or or lower weight and really working on fine-tuning your mechanics no okay this is such a great this is such a great overview let me try to let me try to encapsulate the whole run of show and then we're going to talk about a little bit more like like practical nuance because not everybody lives in ideality where there are rainbows and unicorns and gummy bears everywhere i know such a shame so if we had an athlete in the perfect scenario or as perfect as we can get they would have nine months to train okay when we're combining strength training and running we'll say that that that's a reasonable uh that's a that's a reasonable training solution for this particular athlete the first three months would be hard heavy lifting combined with a medium amount of running right three to five uh three to five reps of about three sets the second phase the second three months so months for counting backwards from the event six to three

six months out from the event to three months out from the event oh god the subtraction's hard the addition's hard the subtraction's even harder six months out to the visual needed to be used my face in that six months out to three months out to the event the the reps go higher and the weight the weight goes down the weight goes lower and so the overall stress load of the of the strength training sessions goes down and the overall stress load of the running goes up correct at the very end when the running is probably the highest like you're doing a lot of volume the run is absolutely running needs to supersede any weight strength training prioritization by a magnitude of 10 or 20 fold or 100 fold depending upon your perspective but a lot i guess is my point the strength training load goes down to almost nothing and yeah and what you are doing is working to support any gaps you might have exactly just help support your running exactly and i don't make that statement to say that it's maintenance as i mentioned earlier on that tirade i don't mean to make that statement to to connotate that you're that you're doing anything that's maintaining those gains i'm i'm i'm doing that to say that you can do it with very little consequence to the impact that it has on your running training that's the that's the 100 that's the takeaway with this that's absolutely because doing those harder heavier workouts when you're having your harder heavier running going on something's

going to give and you're not going to get the most out of either and if running is your goal which we've signed up for an event that's that's what we're doing totally it really you're going to have a lot of fatigue and like you said earlier which i think cannot be said enough strength training is not a rest day yep i love that statement okay let's um so that's that's in an ideal world and all too often we work well most of the time not all too often almost all the time we have to be in reality all the time we have to be in reality it's not always going to follow this hey i get an athlete nine months out from an event or like four years if we're talking about olympic cycles olympic year this year right that you know most people they push the oh shit button they're like oh my god i just signed up for this event and i've got five months like that's the reality for us as coaches and also for a lot of athletes that are training for events they kind of they you know maybe they're neglectful maybe they ate too many christmas cookies or whatever but they get behind me they get behind the eight ball in the the training that they that they should be doing what do athletes do if they still make this yes no if they still come to this answer yes i should include strength training or no i shouldn't they still say yes i should do that i'm a reasonable candidate for that where where should they do if they don't or what should they do if they don't have this entire nine month run a show what do they do if that's just to say they have five or six months like what do they do then five or six months i would start in to be honest with you in that middle season that three sets of

eight to just go straight there i yeah because with what you said five to six months yeah yeah yeah because if we've got two months say before our race day or our event where we're going to be kind of shifting more into that you know the fine tuning that only gives you two to three months and chances are your run volume is going to be your things are going to be very focused for your event with your running and i think that those heavier reps and sets that first performance enhancement segment you don't have a lot of time to work within that to reap any benefits i mean if you remember the studies we we we were reflecting on with the last one most of those studies were at least you know around 12 weeks yeah yep or some of those yep so not to say that you can't get any benefit but you won't get a real a significant amount of time to really groove into that i think that you're better served getting into that middle season and maybe going on closer to the eight reps pushing a little bit harder weight in the very beginning just you know for fun to kind of test some things out but very quickly get into that that you know strength training that is serving your running not the other way around okay i i yeah i i think that that's a reasonable approach i mean you're going to leave some of the architecture off the table but you're still it's not like you're not going to improve oh the bigger mistake would be chopping off the end of the strength training piece so you remove that piece where the strength training stress load takes a nosedive and you just phase shift everything else forward that would i i would say that would be an error if you have like two not too few but if

you have a compressed kind of time frame to look at because you have this training mismatch on the on the strength training in the running side agreed 100 and that you know and then the next season you can just start earlier with that strength training yeah this actually brings up a good question that we got on instagram we put it out a couple of weeks ago this is from this is going to go back to my i can't pronounce people's names and i can't pronounce people's instagram handles as well but uh rob reed readerer sorry rob if i butchered that but he he sent us a note on instagram says how do you know when you're doing too much versus not enough strength training what do you think there the the too much i i think that's generally what you're going to have is is too much for most people and it's going to be you are what you're you're late everything's too fatigued so if you're lifting and by the time your long run comes up that you aren't able to do any of your run the quality of your run decreases as programmed so it's supposed to be a very specific run the parameters and you can't complete it or you can't do it as you know as programmed that's a sign so you're using i i i love that litmus test the litmus test of the next hard run as the indicator for too much of whatever beforehand too much run training too much strength training or whatever like using that next hard run and the feedback and the subjective and objective feedback that you get from that next hard run in the context of everything else obviously but using that as the litmus test i think is a brilliant way to do it

there's a lot of there's a lot and you know i always poke fun of strength trainers there's a lot of strength training like gurus out there that'll have these like completely over convoluted spreadsheets to track training load and weight load and training stress and things like that just kind of how we do in training peaks on the endurance side of things but despite all that and i appreciate the effort that people you know put forth to put into those i think there's value in that your biggest litmus test is the actual performance it's always the performance and so it's always the performance so if the performance is compromised let's just run through the scenario right let's say you had an athlete you had them do a hard workout hard running workout they had some sort of strength training session and then an easy day and then a hard run day and that second hard run day they were just like off they're a little bit sore and things like that like what are the steps that you would kind of and we determined that there was too much training load right yeah what what steps would you go to kind of like reduce that so it you know let's assume at this point they're doing three days a week of lifting and they're in that eight to twelve rep we'll just because that's where a lot of people are going to be right now so if that's the case they might need to go down to two days a week they might need to even go down to two sets i mean they might they need to also reevaluate the weights they're using and be honest with themselves because sometimes you tell someone you know i want you to leave a couple in the tank and they're still going to failure their lifting is heavy it's an ego thing for some people right you want to be able to you know so be honest with yourself of the weight that you're pushing

around and the reps that you're doing and remember that if it's affecting your performance then you've done you've done too much but the first the first removal you would say is the strength training side like if you're doing three days a week go down to two days a week if you're doing two days a week go down to one because our running is our goal right now and i would i would absolutely 100% agree with that and the the i would the caveat though i would just position differently i would just say keep everything else the same yes keep the reps the same the sets the same the weight the same unless it was a really big over like the the strut like they couldn't complete the workout then you look to reduce on all fronts but if it's a little bit just remove one day and usually it kind of course corrects itself and so anyway i try i try to try to pick like really simple and specific things and remove them entirely and then let it course correct versus like peanut butter spreading the good point the the the whatever you're trying to remove to get the stress load and balance that's the only caveat that all out of that that's a really good question and quite common because we've talked about some of the load management pieces of this and it's not easy to figure out no and i think you brought up a really good point because if you just eliminate the one day and then you can see how that corrects then instead of eliminating one day and reducing the reps and sets on the other days well what was it that worked right so if you limit you take take it as we do with other things you just take one thing out

of a time see how it responds take something else out yep so very very good point there okay so we've got this unidealistic situation which is almost everything athlete comes in four or five six months out for an event we're going to kind of plop them into this architecture wherever they would fit based on the original interpretation of it i would say either completely or with some small like coaching nuance but that's that's going to be outside of this conversation otherwise we're going to be here until next week could you could you where does that run out like how much time is too little time to where you would say we don't like strength training is a horrible idea for you given this many months out from the event yeah i would say if you're two months or let you know i mean if you if you come in and you're like i want to start strength training and my events in two months i think at that point your focus should be doing any kind of the more the corrective work at that point we can address that um i really would look to start doing more of the lifting you might again you're you might get a month in yeah which again is not awful you're there will be no but i would focus more on how can we support and strengthen the running at this point instead of trying to create a whole new strength training plan just as the running is getting more serious and even the corrective stuff to be honest with you like that close out like once again i've been in this situation two three months out

athlete says hey i want to start doing this that or the other you can still take this like super low risk approach but i kind of look at it as like i don't want to screw anything up like you're still you're adding something that you could potentially because you're still kind of guessing like especially in a remote setting you're still kind of guessing what those what those weaknesses or imbalances or whatever kind of are and if every especially if everything's going really well yeah i'm kind of like that's that's a very good point too don't don't touch it yeah i'd say three months for sure like anything less than three months after you know if you're in that three to four month range you've got some play but i would agree that you're absolutely right if they're not having any issues now if they're having some issues honestly at this point that's probably best served like they probably should see a pt like if they're starting to have some real major breakdowns with the running that close to the event like in like a series like an injury is popping up yeah that's probably outside most scope of practice of most coaches anyways okay let's keep it on the reality tip then and this is a question i know a lot of a lot of runners will have is they either don't want to go they don't want to go to a gym for whatever reason convenience time whatever and they want to be able to do the same things that or they want to be able to get the same benefits essentially that they can get in a gym with some sort of contriving things that they can get at home what are some simple like tools that anybody can use in any situation that they can either do in their home their basement

their garage stuff like that yeah so you're asking somebody who's actually sitting in her gym right now staring at all of her toys what does it look like i want to know what it looks like what does it look like i'll have to show you we're done it's my little we have a sauna just describe it just just you can describe it so yeah so i've got a weight uh like a rack next to me with five to 45 pound dumbbells a pair of each and then i've got a couple 35 pound kettlebells 24 pound kettlebells 12 pound kettlebells 18 pound kettlebells the stability ball a full-size concept two rower oh wow oh yeah we have a we have a woodway in the other room i my husband didn't need to give me jewelry he got me a woodway that was our north dakota present to each other for surviving north dakota winners um and then a weight vest no trap bar come on no i know everybody's disappointed now i'm sorry i'm sorry i know that's we do have a i know because you feel like a badass all the barbells are in the garage we do have regular barbells okay okay let's take it down a notch though yeah let's take it down a notch you've got some proper equipment there let's like take it down like like five notches let's take it down from 11 um a stability ball is a great piece of equipment that i think doesn't take a lot of space i would recommend getting a pair of appropriate for most people 15 to 25 pound dumbbells you know depending on the individual um and or a decent size kettlebell because

there's a lot of work you can do with kettlebells and some mini bands there you go and like a longer looped power band um that you see in some facilities those are all great places to start and then from there you can just go crazy like i have all of that would cost 100 bucks 150 bucks that you described oh totally and it's pretty simple so simple and don't be afraid to search craigslist that's where we got our weight bench our weight bench that's oh yeah 100 125 bucks oh wow awesome our weight bench our weight rack with all the dumbbells wow that's awesome okay i know um and then if you have a little bit more to spend i am a huge fan of the trx okay the suspension training system and most of those come with like what i would consider because i have one i brought i bought one for the van because it's small it's lightweight i can hook it up to the ladder outside and i know that i'm going to be places where i don't have access to a gym and i still want to do something like that it i've always been impressed it comes with a reasonable instruction manual it does and they also have a really good uh library on youtube of videos and instruction as well um and that is you can do full body on that so if you've got the space to hang one i'm a huge fan of the trx okay especially um as the running increases because then it's just body weight yep so needless to say there's no excuse you can buy a few simple things and you can contrive all of these different categories of movements that we've been talking about the whole time with very very simple equipment yes let's go further down

the the contrived rabbit hole here how many rabbit holes that we got this is the only one i'm gonna go down but okay but but it's pertinent because a lot of many people will look at forms of movement and forms of exercise and think that their strength training when they are in fact not and i'm not gonna you know we got a question on uh another question on instagram and i'm not picking on this particular person because it's a common question um but uh magical 111 there how's that for a name love you brother um would you consider schemo as as a possible strength training routine say three to four hours with 20k avert and or sorry 20k uh 20k total and 2 000 meets avert is that considered strength training and i want to kind of broaden the discussion out because it's it's something that we see a lot and it doesn't matter whether it's schemo or sprinting uphill or doing drills uphill there's a whole huge category of those things that people lump underneath this huge strength training umbrella what are there any of those and what could they possibly be that could that that could that could possibly be considered strength training strength training yeah well and here's the thing you often hear and we've talked

about this before where you hear people say well i'm gonna run hills that's strength training in disguise running hills what running hills is is a running specific drill that makes you stronger at running hills but it's not strength training but it's not strength training right you're not going to get the same response running it's it's running specific right it's not strength training in disguise so it makes you stronger at running hills yeah there's benefit to it there is benefit 100 but to say i'm doing this instead of a lunge and i'm going to get the same stimulus i'm going to get the same outcome is not accurate yes okay so i'm glad we kind of like debunked that because there's a lot of them and i actually when i was in high school i had the same thing we used i'd love i grew up in dallas there aren't a lot of hills there but the one hill that we had the people that are out there they're living in dallas they will know this landmark it's flagpole hill which is right next to white rock lake which is a really popular running area in dallas texas and there's this one hill there it's maybe 200 meters long and it maybe it goes up i don't know like 50 meters of elevation gain or something like that i know and we used to do like loops on it and we do skips up it and we do bounds and we'd sprint up it and things like that and i and a coach at the time who actually i really like i'm still friends with him today he would make this this correlation that it is like strength training quote unquote and i didn't know anything you know when i was 16 years old i just i just kind of took you know took the coach's advice i kind of have the same opinion

right now like strength training is strength training when you're contriving it outside of that it can have a benefit but it's not the same benefit as strength training exactly and that's and that's the the differentiation that's what i think you know don't delude yourself to thinking i'm running up a hill so i'm doing it i don't need to do lunges it's like well if you want the response that a lunge will give you then you need to do lunges yeah 100 squats or whatever it is insert exercise here in strength training okay okay so we went through this whole nine month architecture and then the variance of that if you get plopped in the middle what about too much and things like that remember that was only like one piece of what we talked about in the last podcast right this is strength training as an ergogenic aid is the umbrella that we gave it there was this whole other piece which is strength training for injury prevention which looks very similar to essentially the last phase that's exactly that yeah so if you were to insert it anywhere in here that's that last phase basically can you do that year round yeah do year round you can there's not a huge impact on your running nope a lot a lot of recovery you don't need a lot of recovery you probably don't periodize it because there's not enough stress to actually periodize it yeah it's very gentle on the body well i gentle i i you know i mean it probably has a big venn diagram overlap with physical therapy so if you went into a physical therapy with physical therapist office for some like injury you would come at most of the time you will come out of that with some type of in your

world sarah corrective exercises that are going to look very similar to the exercises in this last phase yeah as a matter of fact because i you know working with clients you know in-person clients for personal training i will get people and i will find you know runners that i get in when i work on the base and i'll have them start doing certain exercises based on some issues they're like oh i had a physical therapist show me this or i was doing this in physical therapy a couple years ago and so yeah it's it's it's very uh reminiscent to a lot of folks of that's that kind of design yeah yeah and i i've i don't know i i always try to i try to limit as much waste as possible whenever i'm coaching athletes even when the impact is is like the training impact is very low so in the corrective exercise sense that training impact is is very low there's still a time impact and that's real you know i mean that's that's real and so while the you could very easily take the argument of it ain't gonna hurt i hate when people throw that around it ain't gonna hurt so you might as well do it with the correctives and you could very easily say that you had ain't gonna hurt i don't know i mean if you really wanted to full rest day is better yeah i mean if you really wanted to split the hair kind of fine you could say man maybe rest is your better you know your better injury prevention thing than doing these correctives maybe not you know so again yeah depends on the person but that's that's definitely i think something somebody people should take into consideration yeah yeah okay i like what we've

now presented this is like i think that i think that we're patting ourselves on the back a lot with this i think that anybody listening to this what i hope they'll take away is that strength training just like your run training shouldn't be static throughout the course of the year it should be balanced with the type of run training that we're going to do and this actually brings me to another caveat that i'm going to kind of get into in a second and then if you're looking at it from an injury prevention standpoint you can take this last phase that we uh discussed and and kind of do it year round but what about the proposition for an athlete that wants to start strength training and i love this conversation because it's like a philosophical coaching conversation as well they want to start strength training but they know they know that three months out from their event four months out from their event five months out from their event they just can't keep up with it they can't keep keep up with it because of the time commitment they can't keep up with it because of the training commitment some kind of doesn't really matter at that point right they just can't keep up with the strength training so they've done like phase one and maybe half a phase two or whatever and you know you know you know you know you know from the onset that they're going to have to completely remove strength training for the last four months of their training in your opinion we'll bat this around a little bit is that still a viable option to do i believe it is i believe it is yeah because let's say we're starting

they start at the very beginning of that nine months and they're doing that more performance set you know x you know setup is that going to make you stronger in the running that you're doing following that is that going to set you up for success is that laying a foundation of success is that helping shore up some weak areas is that um i i do believe there is a benefit there okay well i so i agree with that i'll take a little bit more of a sophisticated approach though i think it's a i think it's a second order benefit so clearly the first order benefits that you get from strength training in their primary it's primarily running economy yes you can say that there's you you can argue that there are others but let me stylize the argument into that it's primarily running economy that is an acute adaptation and that acute adaptation comes and goes acutely so if you remove the strength training stress you're removing whatever benefit that you then have just got that's the first order effect you do you do a strength training intervention 12 months 12 weeks later you measure their running economy their running economy is better you remove the strength training and 12 weeks after that likely as long as everything else is the same which would i mean that's a really hard intervention to do we're living in a real you know non-reality world here once you remove that strength training at a certain point that acute adaptation will go away but here's the second order effect and i don't think people think about this a lot because

this happens with altitude as well and heat and heat stress so you put the intervention in place you get the you get the performance bump because of that performance bump you're then able to do a higher workload so you're re let's just take a track runner your 800 meter repeats are faster your thousand meter repeats are faster your your one mile repeats are faster all of your endurance runs are faster because of this acute adaptation the second order effect of the training stress implication for all of those runs being faster that lasts almost for forever if you could totally remove the stress of course it goes away but that lasts for months and months and months and months because you've got you're literally training harder like you're literally imposing a higher absolute amount of stress on the body and that has implications far down the line and far longer than that a cute a cute piece so i would say that it's a it's it's reasonable whether or not it's right it's another conversation because that's individual athlete but i would say it's a reasonable argument to say even if the strength training intervention is short three months four months whatever and not nine months or a year even if it's short you can take the second order benefit as another rationale to incorporate the strength training piece so it so so anyway this whole i think when we trivialize

the use it or lose it phrasing meaning you stop doing it and automatically you lose that adaptation we do the same thing on the cardiovascular physiology right you stop doing vo2 max work your vo2 max goes down when we trip when we trivialize these training arguments of that it really doesn't do anything justice because there are always second order effects of getting of getting bumps from a training intervention and like i said earlier you can say the same thing for altitude right yes you improve your yeah heat right you improve your body's physiological capability for handling stress and they can handle a higher absolute workload that trickles on down the line ironically enough that's a big argument for longer sentences for dopers is this trickle down training effect but it's i mean i think once again i mean i use that as an i use that as an example to say that any intervention that you use strength training being one of them any intervention that you use you're getting the a cute effect but then you're also getting second order effects down the load because the athlete can handle a higher absolute workload yes that was a really long tirade sorry about that no that was beautifully put though but that was that was really well put so i think i think that absolutely makes sense so don't so don't get justification so don't get locked into a use it or lose it mentality that's what uh that's what i was trying to like get get out of that we got there in the end yeah got there it's oh it's better better to have it for nine months in the perfect scenario not to have it at all then yeah better to have it

for nine months and i would say that as long i would say going back to like the how short is too short right these are all like coaching conversations that we've had i'll say as long as you have like a reasonable you know 10 to 12 weeks at time or whatever to actually like do some productive like like strength training as an ergogenic aid that'd probably be the minimum effective dose agreed um as long as you have that amount of time you can still make a plausible argument to say that you'll get a benefit even if you have to remove it later might not be a strong but there's something there but there could there could be something there so anyway okay i'm glad we talked good point yeah i'm glad we talked about that okay sarah anything else you want to go over for the listeners now that they're fully informed and educated and they're going to go away from this and buy a you know set of kettlebells and stability bars and trap bars hopefully if they listen to me anything else you want to mention to the audience uh no just don't don't be afraid you know especially maintain you're running you're you know in your season and you're not ready willing you know ready to incorporate this but don't be afraid to to keep this in mind down the line and and incorporate this into your your run program i think at some point because as we just talked about i feel like there is great benefit um especially my side of things i think in the injury prevention area as well it's pretty important awesome all right we'll leave it at that sarah i appreciate your time second time around we got it yeah we got it no no screaming cats this episode no screaming cats i

think everybody appreciate will appreciate the screaming cats that episode dropped this morning to give you guys a little bit of context of where we're recording so we'll see how many people hate the screaming cats we got your mic working this time which is great but uh thank you yeah well sarah as always i appreciate your time coming all the way from germany i know the time difference is always hard for you to attend some of these things but i totally appreciate it thanks for having me cool all all right sarah all right and there you have it guys and girls people of the ultra running world hopefully you all have a very good framework for if you want to incorporate strength training into your ultra running routine how to actually do it a couple of big points that we emphasized during the podcast and i'll and i'll emphasize right now is that your strength training routine just like your running routine should not should not be static throughout the year if you're doing the same thing in the strength training room you're lifting the same weight same set rep combination for you know more than three months at a time really more than two months at a time to be honest with you you're doing the same thing time and time after time and time again it's probably not going to do you that much good or at least the good that you're getting is deteriorating as you're doing those monotonous number of sets and reps so change it change it in accordance to your running as your running starts to become a higher priority in your training program your strength training because

should become less of a priority and the impact that that strength training has or how hard it is should absolutely go down i hope you guys take that that single fact right there away from this from this podcast vary your strength training in accordance with your running as the running goes up running it's harder strength training should get easier and you can also do that vice versa appreciate you guys for listening as always love the heck out of you guys if you have not had the chance to give this a rating on itunes go ahead go on over to itunes give it a rating a review or just simply subscribe that helps the podcast out a lot as you guys know no advertisements on this podcast i'm not trying to make a dime off of it i just want to present it and i just want to present all the information in a fair and honest way to you guys and i don't want advertisers to kind of mock up the middle of it as it always or it has as it has the tendency to do so the way you can help out is tell a friend about it go give a rating on itunes i would really appreciate it thanks again to coach sarah for helping out with this podcast really directing it she really is really really fantastic uh both on the run training side obviously that's why we hired her at cts but also with her background in strength and corrective exercises she adds a wealth of knowledge and practical implementation uh to the group that we had thank you very much sarah thanks again to the

listeners you guys and as always oh wait a minute i'm gonna be at trans grand canaria this weekend helping out a couple of athletes and meeting with the spartan people i'm looking forward to that and then i will be at lake sonoma i'll be out there with the van in the middle of april what's the actual date on that i think it's april 11th anyway i'll be out at the lake sonoma 50 supporting athletes there we've got a ton of cts athletes there i will be taking your questions out of the KoopCast mobile i still don't have a good name for this but out of my van which i've converted the back of it into a mobile recording studio i recorded some questions from some athletes at black canyons a couple weeks ago and it was it was great we're gonna load those up uh into a podcast uh and i'm gonna do the same thing at lake sonoma so if you see me at lake sonoma come on by come on in the van love to have you there record a question and it will get read or it will get played because we're gonna play the person's voice it will get played live on a future edition of the KoopCast and we'll absolutely answer that question and pick it apart in every nuance and detail just like we do for the rest of the of all of these podcasts so thank you guys for listening like i said appreciate the heck out of you guys and we will see you out on the trails you you you